The Horror of Love: Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski in Paris and London

Even readers unfamiliar with English novelist Nancy Mitford will enjoy the historical sweep of her life as captured by Hilton (Queens Consort). Not quite a straight biography, the book tells the stories, sometimes in parallel and sometimes intersecting, of Nancy and her muse and romantic partner, Gaston Palewski. A close confidant of Charles de Gaulle, Gaston defied humble origins to serve as a Free French commander during WWII and became a powerful politician afterwards. After meeting Mitford at a London garden party in 1942, he became her lover. Despite his many other conquests, the couple never quite extinguished their nonmonogamous bliss, though a late-in-life marriage to a young countess (fulfilling a lifetime of social climbing) ended the affair. By contrast Mitford, born to privilege if not wealth as a member of English nobility, palled around with Evelyn Waugh as her sisters Diana and Unity dallied with Nazism, and achieved fame of her own with the 1945 publication of The Pursuit of Love, which immortalized Gaston in fiction as the “ideal French lover,” Fabrice de Sauveterre. Hilton, in engaging fashion, argues that their relationship embodied the “civilized,” “rational” vision of love put forth in Mitford’s novels. Agent: Orion Publishing Group. (Dec.)